Web App Servers: No Time To Wait
E-biz has pushed app server deployment into high gear
By CANDEE WILDE
The race to deploy app servers presses forward. Sorting out which vendor to choose in this fast-paced market can be daunting. For starters, there are the obvious players like Bluestone, Netscape, SilverStream and Sun Microsystems, and established middleware vendors like BEA Systems. But now, operating system powerhouse Microsoft has entered the game, IBM and Lotus have app servers, and development tool makers Forte Software and Progress also market them.
Faced with this daunting array of options, most e-commerce companies do their research, make a choice and move forward--largely because they simply don't have time to wait and see how the products perform or how the market shakes out. In a series of interviews with e-commerce companies, we found that network managers want products they can deploy quickly and will integrate with existing back-end systems and scale as the business grows.
One good example is The Detroit Edison Co., which selected Secant's Extreme Enterprise Server because it let the company deploy applications quickly. The utility had to meet a regulatory deadline for creating a system that could monitor and control its electricity generation, distribution and billing.
Under deregulation, Michigan customers will be able to choose their electric company. As the former monopoly, Detroit Edison is required to let new electricity retailers enter the market. Part of this responsibility includes building a system that keeps track of the retailers, including how much power they sell, which company generated and delivered the electricity and where it went. The system also has to track the related financial transactions and generate appropriate bills and payments.
To find a solution that was robust enough to support its Retail Access System (RAS), Detroit Edison held a bakeoff--asking several vendors to build part of a transaction system simultaneously at the utility's headquarters, says Stephen Goldstein, chief IT architect at Detroit Edison. BEA Web Logic, Gemstone and IBM competed with Secant.
Detroit Edison ultimately selected Secant Extreme Enterprise Server for Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) because deployment was fast and easy, Goldstein says. From its initial rollout nearly a year ago, the app server linked an Oracle database and a Web server. Now the solution also ties in the billing system and information from a meter-reading application. Several hundred users--both internal staff and energy retailers--can access RAS via the Internet.
Detroit Edison had been mostly building two-tier, client/server applications before it tackled RAS.
"This was the first object-oriented application we built. We had put off object-oriented development for a long time, thinking it wasn't ready for prime-time production applications," Goldstein says. "It was challenging, but I think we're making the transition. We're rolling out our second object-oriented application this month.''
Detroit Edison will continue to embrace Java and build object-oriented applications because it "lets us build applications from smaller components and ultimately deliver value earlier" in the form of functionality for business users, according to Goldstein.
Secant grew from a services company that built middleware to providing database connections, security and transaction processing for mission-critical business systems for large corporations. In the course of developing these systems, the company's core product--Secant Extreme--was created and released as an application server in 1998. Its flagship product is Secant Extreme Enterprise Server, which comes in a version for C++ and another for EJB. Its second product line is Secant Extreme Persistent Object Server, which includes technology that lets users put objects in a relational database and get them out again.
Rubin says Secant's method of application development, called "model-based development with cogeneration," makes development fast and easy. In essence, developers create a model describing the business objects involved in the application and specify the mapping to the database; the majority of the back-end code is generated automatically.
"Then the user goes in and fills in the details of the remaining 5 percent, the details of the business logic, and you're done," Rubin says.
Overall, app servers have to become easier to use for the widespread adoption people are predicting to materialize, says Rubin. Ideally, people with relatively little technological knowledge but a great deal of knowledge about their own business and company can use these tools to create enterprise-class applications quickly. "This is not brain surgery any more," says Rubin.
Still, there's a knowledge gap as client/server developers strive to understand how to create applications for a distributed environment, says Rob Beitch, director of business development for Sybase Inc.'s Internet applications division. Sybase has attempted to narrow this gap by allowing users of its Enterprise Application Server (EAServer) to view apps as a simple set of core components. Then, by integrating tools like Sybase's PowerBuilder and PowerJ with EAServer, users can work with the component software to create solutions quickly and easily, says Beitch.
To remain competitive in the app server market as products become commodities, Beitch says the company will focus on helping users build portals, using Sybase's infrastructure software, as well as its database, middleware, app servers and development tools.
"This requires a secure infrastructure capable of delivering all information over the Web, integrating non-Web systems, processing transactions, and managing and publishing content," Beitch says.
While Sybase's distributed application infrastructure supports large enterprise installations, it's also combining value-priced software and services for smaller companies that want to do business on the Web. This package is called Sybase.Startup.Com. Users can spend as little as $9,000 for the company's Adaptive Server Enterprise Database. The package also includes EAServer and 10 user licenses for PowerJ and Power Designer 7.0 Object Architect development tools, plus a day of onsite consulting.
E-solutions architect John Galvin expects Sybase and fellow software veteran Oracle to do well in the app server market. Galvin, of Destiny WebSolutions Inc., builds Web-based apps for Fortune 1000 financial services clients. He also helped build an app server architecture, using C++ and a proprietary scripting language. "We made a wrong technology choice; we should have joined the Java bandwagon," says Galvin, adding that the company no longer markets the proprietary app server product.
As Sybase and Oracle, as well as BEA, IBM, Microsoft and Sun-Netscape, incorporate app servers with their widely deployed products, they probably will convince many of their current users to stay with them.
"If an enterprise has made a strategic commitment to one of these companies, it will be a natural extension to use their app server technology," Galvin says.
This was true for The Oriental Trading Co. (OTC), which sells value-priced toys, novelties and crafts through mail-order catalogs. When the company decided to change its static Web sites into e-commerce operations, OTC picked IBM's WebSphere Application Server Standard Edition (WSS) and a DB2 Universal Database. OTC opted for IBM's products because these applications let them leverage existing investments in back-end systems. The company, which imports merchandise from Asia, Mexico, and Central and Latin America, generates revenue of $350 million annually.
Bob Cargill, OTC's systems engineering manager, says the company has had a Web presence since mid-1997, but e-commerce is new--and far exceeding expectations. OTC's four Web sites are getting 10,000 visits per day and serving 100,000 HTML pages. As much as 7 percent of the company's total order volume is coming from the Web, nearly triple OTC's expectations.
"We have AS/400 systems that handle our order processing, order entry and inventory, as well as product movement, for the orders we take by phone, mail or fax," he says. "Interfacing to our back-end systems was easier since we decided to go with AS/400 as our Web presence, too." Not including application developers' salaries, Cargill says the entire hardware/software solution cost nearly $200,000.
IT systems access WebSphere through a series of "e-business connectors" based on the programming interface, Java DataBase Connectivity (JDBC). These connectors provide an important vehicle to help IBM users protect legacy IBM systems as they incorporate Internet technologies, according to Nigel Beck, WebSphere marketing program director for the IBM Software Group. He says although it is easy to integrate its app servers with installed IBM gear, the company's family of servers and development tools also creates an open application framework that lets users build, run and manage e-business applications from a variety of vendor platforms.
IBM recently announced that it has more closely integrated WSS with its midrange app server, WebSphere Advanced Edition (WSA), making it easier for companies to integrate the two, or transition from one to the other. Its high-end app server, WebSphere Enterprise, still has a separate code base. None of IBM's servers support Sun Microsystems' Java2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) yet, although the company says it will add support for this technology after the J2EE spec is finalized, which is expected in the second half of 2000.
J2EE is an expanded version of Sun Microsystems' Java Platform for the Enterprise. It includes Java Server Pages, Java Servlets and EJB programming models, as well as a number of protocols and APIs for Java, including JDBC.
Last month, Sun announced it had acquired Forte Software Inc. and NetBeans Inc. to round out its Internet-based e-business products and services. Forte was a leading provider of tools to build distributed applications. NetBeans, based in the Czech Republic, provided Java technology for Linux operating systems. These acquisitions added a layer of confusion to the app server market since they followed Sun's 1998 alliance with Netscape, as well as the acquisition of NetDynamics, a Web application server vendor.
In March 1999, Sun and America Online, which owns Netscape, unveiled a strategic collaboration that is now called the Sun-Netscape Alliance. Five months later, the Sun-Netscape Alliance introduced its iPlanet Commerce Integration Suite, which includes e-commerce application and server software, primarily based on Netscape's Application Server (NAS). Analysts speculate that Sun intends during the second half of 2000 to release a new product using NAS's core technology and incorporating Forte's tool set and J2EE.
Destiny's Galvin says the Sun-Netscape Alliance added clutter to its e-business products by purchasing Forte "when they probably didn't need it." As the Alliance works on how to best
integrate NetDynamics' and Netscape's app servers, some customers are either delaying a Sun purchase until its strategy becomes clearer or moving forward by choosing other vendors, says Galvin.
But Roseanna Marchetti, principal product marketing manager for the iPlanet application server and related tools, says the Alliance has created a strong end-to-end product offering for e-business with NAS as the engine or plumbing for the other products and tools. She says developing a strong brand for iPlanet will help alleviate the current confusion.
"I think the hardest times for the Alliance are behind us," says Marchetti, who is actually on AOL's payroll since she was a Netscape employee when the alliance was formed. "For the industry and the marketplace, the Sun-Netscape Alliance was like two planets colliding, since we both had market-leading app servers as products."
Marchetti, who wears both a Sun badge and a Netscape badge, as do all Alliance employees, says in some ways the Alliance feels separate from all three of its parents. One important initiative, she says, will be creating a lower-priced version of iPlanet for companies that can't afford the $35,000 per CPU price tag.
Forte customer Chris Nabinger, executive vice president of Prio Inc., says he is not concerned about problems stemming from Sun's acquisition of Forte. Prio is a 6-month-old company that provides commerce solutions, such as special promotions, that link Internet and brick-and-mortar merchants. Prio's applications, which sort and respond to shoppers' promotions through a portal partners' Web site, were developed and are managed using Forte's development tools. They are hosted on Sun Microsystems' commercial servers. "We use Sun equipment today and we use Forte, so any marriage will probably result in something positive for us," says Nabinger.
"With thousands of merchants and potentially millions of consumers, we needed a technology infrastructure that can handle a high volume of transactions over the Internet architecture while providing round-the-clock security and a high level of scalability," he says.
These needs are common among application server users. Some industry experts question Microsoft's ability to deliver enterprise-class scalability and robustness, and consider it a platform-specific solution because its app server qualities are embedded in its operating system.
"The upcoming version of Windows NT has most of the pieces that would qualify it to be an application server, but I think one of the benefits of an application server is the ability to run on multiple platforms," says Charles Stack, CEO of Flashline.com Inc., a Cleveland company that provides a market for customers to buy and sell reusable software components. "You have greater scalability when you can move from a PC to a mainframe using the same code, and you don't get that with NT," Stack says.
Still, others say Microsoft's app server capabilities make the company a solid contender as it bundles its application-development environment with new and existing system tools and its operating system platforms. By including its app server functionality in its operating system, Microsoft "is integrating the Web to the core" of users' solutions, Microsoft's Leake says.
Jeff Block, vice president of Internet start-up SelectTeeTimes.com, says Microsoft's app server platform, Windows Distributed interNet Architecture (DNA), which uses COM+, is performing very well for his company. SelectTeeTimes.com, which uses Windows NT, is essentially an application service provider for golf courses. The company has created an application it distributes to golf courses via the Internet that allows course managers to aggregate their unreserved tee times and post them on its Web site, where golfers can "find a tee time in a given area in 60 seconds," Block says.
SelectTeeTimes.com provides hardware, Web-based software and support to 150 golf courses nationwide. Its two main reasons for choosing Microsoft were speed of deployment and affordability. "Cash is always a consideration for start-ups," Block says.
But the company is also concerned about robustness and scalability. Block says developers constantly evaluate the performance of the site as it grows. Currently, SelectTeeTimes.com hosts information about 150 golf courses and delivers "tens of thousands of Web pages a day to thousands of unique users," Block says, adding that Microsoft's solution will be even more effective in Windows 2000, which the company plans to release in February. This is because the application services environment, DNA 2000, "will be completely integrated, not a bolt onto the operating system like it is with NT."
Even when SelectTeeTimes.com considers more expensive CORBA alternatives, "we keep coming back to Microsoft and COM+," says Block. Microsoft's plans to support Extensible Markup Language (XML) with its upcoming BizTalk Server will be an added benefit, facilitating business-to-business communication by making data independent of applications, according to Block. In DNA 2000, XML will be the primary method for enabling communication between applications, he says.
Although the app server market is cluttered and confused now, experts predict that increasing commoditization of features and ongoing consolidation of the market will thin out some of the choices. But next-generation app servers will compete in new areas, such as providing integrated content management and personalization technologies.
While few can predict how the market will shake out, what's clear is that the rapid-fire pace of deployment will continue for several months. For those vying to be serious e-commerce players, this is no time to wait.
Candee Wilde is a freelance computer journalist based in Easton, Conn. She can be reached at cwilde@connix.com.
